Topic: adolescent stress

Experiencing stress during adolescence profoundly alters the neural systems that control goal-directed flexible behaviour. These changes are persistent and are thought to drive behavioural inflexibility in adults, a hallmark symptom of several mental illnesses, including addiction, depression, obsessive compulsive disorder and schizophrenia. The ventral hippocampus (vH) is heavily impacted by stress, however, its role in flexible behaviour remains unclear, partially due to its heterogeneity. Thus, the current study investigates how individual vH projection populations contribute to behavioural

Stress during adolescence is a known risk factor for neuropsychiatric disorders later in life, but how different factors alter the susceptibility to lasting cognitive or affective impairment is only partially understood. Here, we asked whether activin, a member of the TGF-β family, has a role in this process, the rationale being that activin affects the neural underpinnings of cognitive performance and affective behavior in the adult brain. We combined a mouse model of adolescent stress (corticosterone between postnatal days 30-45) with a transgenic mouse line expressing a dominant-negative mu